Another blow for celebrity culture

One of the things I most hate about modern culture is its assumption that because a person is good at one thing (acting, miming, being amusingly drunk), they're automatically multitalented, and intelligent. Thus we move from talent to 'celebrity', in which the doings and sayings of anyone famous become somehow important. 


But sometimes this comes back to bite us on the collective bottom. Lee Ryan's famous comment on September 11th ('Who gives a fuck about New York when elephants are being killed?') now has a rival: Morrissey.

The controversial former The Smiths star was on stage at a show in Warsaw, Poland on Sunday night (24th July 2011) when he gave his thoughts on the two terror attacks in Oslo, which claimed the lives of at least 76 people.

According to Britain's Daily Mirror, before starting his track 'Meat Is Murder', the outspoken vegetarian told the crowd, "We all live in a murderous world, as the events in Norway have shown... Though that is nothing compared to what happens in McDonald's and Kentucky Fried S**t every day."

Morrissey saddens me. Once so talented, now a shadow of his former self. Away from the music, he seems to have assumed that because the media listens to him, he must be some kind of intellectual. His comments on immigration to Britain never cease to appal me: the son of Irish immigrants attacking other immigrants. Ugh. On this one, it's so entirely obvious how wrong he is that I'm not going to wear out my keyboard explaining it to you.


Obviously it's a bit cheeky of a provincial blogger to suggest that other people have delighted us long enough (as Austen put it) with their opinions, but at least I'm not parlaying some other form of achievement into a bully pulpit. 


Although… one of the delights of new media, especially Twitter, is the unmediated potential. I assume that every public statement made by someone famous is entirely scripted by a PR adviser. But because everybody has a mobile, and every celebrity will have an iPhone, they're more likely to wrest control of the easier media from their advisers, though the smarter PR agents will be on top of this. Angry, drunk, coked-up or merely dim celebrities will be tweeting their every 'thought' before the PA can stop them. And this can only be a good thing, because it rips away the glitz and reveals the flawed, often monstrous human. The end of celebrity culture can only be hastened.  Huzzah!